Anonymity and Identity Online

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that anonymized online forum usernames can be statistically linked to IP addresses, revealing the geographic and institutional origins of toxic and non-toxic content across the economics profession.

Contribution

It introduces a method to de-anonymize online forum users using username generation patterns, enabling analysis of content origins and characteristics.

Findings

Recovered 47,630 IP addresses from 7 million posts

Attributed posts to diverse economic institutions and geographies

Analyzed variation in toxic content across different groups

Abstract

Economics Job Market Rumors (EJMR) is an online forum and clearinghouse for information on the academic job market for economists. It also includes content that is abusive, defamatory, racist, misogynistic, or otherwise "toxic." Almost all of this content is created anonymously by contributors who receive a four-character username when posting on EJMR. Using only publicly available data we show that the statistical properties of the scheme by which these usernames were generated allows the IP addresses from which most posts were made to be determined with high probability. We recover 47,630 distinct IP addresses of EJMR posters and attribute them to 66.1% of the roughly 7 million posts made over the past 12 years. We geolocate posts and describe aggregated cross-sectional variation -- particularly regarding toxic, misogynistic, and hate speech -- across sub-forums, geographies, institutions, and IP addresses. Our analysis suggests that content on EJMR comes from all echelons of the economics profession, including, but not limited to, its elite institutions.